Browsing Posts tagged Dingos

The classic story of animal domestication runs something like this: A wolf wanders into a fire circle, shares a meal with humans, and in time becomes a dog.

Skeleton of an aurochs (Bos primigenius), an extinct wild ox–AdstockRF

That dog encourages aurochs to remain close to humans, the better to become a cow over time. Darwinian theory, to raise that vastly oversimplified picture up a few levels, holds that domestication involves the careful intervention of humans, who isolate wild animals, select favorable traits, and breed them to produce such things as turkeys that are all breast and cats that are a splendor of fur.

That picture is now complicated by recent research done by Fiona Marshall, an anthropologist at Washington University, who holds that Neolithic herders were rather less rigorous in their program of domestication. Instead, large herbivores were managed rather than isolated, allowed to interbreed with their wild kin. The result was a diverse, genetically healthy population of livestock animals of many kinds—including, in this study, camels, alpacas, donkeys, cattle, and sheep. This is in sharp contrast with the genetically monocultural domestication practices of industrial livestock production.

"Service Animal" Scammers (New Yorker): An increasing number of your neighbors have been keeping company with their pets in human-only establishments simply by claiming that the creatures are their licensed companion animals and are necessary to their mental well-being.